Huma Airgun Regulators Blogs

BSA R10 Tuning Regulator

Although the BSA R10 is my personal favourite rifle, I have encountered a lot of problems with the factory regulator in the past.
After a lot of reading on the UK BSAOG forum I concluded that my R-10 was not the only rifle suffering from these problems:

problems with the regulator piston getting stuck,

regulator valves leaking on the older models,

inconsistency in power and pellet speed,

some regulators do not function properly above 200 bar, even though the fill pressure is 230bar,

the power increases as the bottle pressure drops on the newer models,

the regulator pressure can change if the bottle is removed (this affects the power) on the older models.

It seems BSA have changed the regulator design in every new R10 model, they were obviously not satisfied with the performance of their regulator if they kept changing it.
I got in contact with Darrin Lynn from XTX Air, who is an expert in tuning the R-10, he gave me some good advice on how to improve the factory regulator. This helped a lot and improved the reaction time of the reg and it also solved the problem of the piston sticking.
The consistency of the regulator did improve but I was still not completely satisfied.

Darrin also made sure that I did not forgot about the regulator and he kept pushing me to take a look at the design of the factory regulator to see what could be done to improve/fix it and he sent us some factory parts to take a look at.
Although I am pretty sure BSA are one of the finest rifle builders, I am not convinced about the design of the regulator at all. In my opinion there are some issues in the design that will prevent the regulator from ever becoming consistent and reliable, no matter what you do to it.
There were a few options to sort out the R-10 regulator:

Take a close look at the original design, try to improve it to resolve all the issues. Due to some major design flaws I did not think that this was a viable option.

I know some tuners who remove or by-pass the factory regulator, they machine the whole action to fit another type of regulator. This will solve the problems but it is time consuming, which makes it very expensive and it is an irreversible change to the rifle.

The last and most difficult option was to design a new regulator to replace the standard regulator without having to modify the rifle or regulator block.

The last option was a big challenge; we had to see if we could design a regulator that would fit the existing regulator housing, without any machining to the regulator housing, the regulator needed to work perfectly, without any compromises in the regulating behaviour. Last but not least, the outside dimensions of the new regulator could not be any bigger than the original regulator, otherwise the action would no longer fit the stock.

We have been working on this new design for weeks and we have found a great replacement for the original regulator.
It’s made out of a combination of high grade aircraft aluminium and chrome alloy steel. It has a completely different working principle to the original R-10 regulator, it solves all the known issues.
The regulator is vented to atmospheric pressure which is key to keeping the regulating behaviour consistent and not creeping up in power over time.
Most importantly, it is very easy to install, just unscrew the original regulator, screw the new HuMa-Air R-10 regulator into the regulator housing, adjust the power (if necessary) and you are done!